Chapter 30
Chapter
Thirty
Elara
Two days bleed into one another, gray and suffocating.
They’re long, dull stretches where the sun doesn’t quite rise and the clocks in the palace seem to tick slower, as if the rot in the walls has infected time itself. I move in a daze between Daron’s room, Mother’s, and my own, a ghost haunting a corridor of dying things.
Two days of not seeing either man.
My nerves are frayed ropes, snapping with every shadow that shifts. The pot I brought Daron earlier is empty—eaten or spilled, I don’t know. So I go back down.
I carry the empty pot through the twilight of the lower hallways. The servants I pass keep their heads down, eyes averted. They know. Everyone knows that something is wrong—a tension that has all our spines straightened.
I push open the heavy oak door leading to the kitchens, but the usual clamor of pots and pans is gone. It’s late, the fires are banked. I get the broth, ladle it out, head back.
My path takes me past the greenhouse. The glass structure looms in the gathering dark, condensation weeping down the panes, blurring the twisted shapes of shadows.
I grip the pot tighter, the ceramic hot against my palms, and quicken my pace. I just want to get back to Daron. I just want—
Metal clanks somewhere.
I jolt, nearly dropping the soup as a figure stumbles out of the humid dark, silhouetted against the moonlight. He sways, catches himself on the frame, and then lurches forward. Toward me.
“You!” The roar is slurry, thick with rage and liquor.
He looks like a ruin all over again, his white shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, stained dark with wine or dirt. His hair is a tangled golden mess, and his eyes…his eyes are bloodshot pits of fury, burning with a frantic, unhinged light.
“Kael?” I take a step back, fear prickling up my spine. “Your Majesty, you’re—”
“You ruined it!” He lunges at me, closing the distance with terrifying speed for a man who sways.
I gasp, stumbling backward.
He’s faster.
Kael grabs my upper arm, his fingers digging into my flesh. The pot slips from my hands, hitting the stone with a wet, heavy crack. Pottery shatters. Hot broth splashes over my boots and the hem of my dress, but Kael doesn’t even flinch.
“You ruined everything!” he bellows, shaking me. His breath hits my face, a noxious cloud of sour wine. “Everything I laid out. Everything I held in place. Everything I was about to—”
“Let go of me!” I struggle, clawing at his hand, but his grip is iron. “Kael, you’re drunk!”
“Drunk?” He laughs, a harsh, jagged sound that scrapes against the glass walls. “You stupid harlot!”
He shoves me backward.
I stumble, my back slamming against the metal frame of the greenhouse so hard the glass panes rattle in their casings.
Pain flares in my shoulder, but fear eclipses it instantly.
I’ve seen him angry before, but this is different.
This isn’t the rage of a king; this is the flailing violence of a drunk.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” I cry, pressing myself against the glass.
“Liar!” He slams a hand against the pane beside my head. “I know where you’ve been. I know what you’ve been doing.” He leans in, his nose inches from mine, his eyes swimming with a toxic mix of hatred and tears. “Under the sheets with that…that bastard!”
The blood drains from my face.
I don’t understand. Is he accusing me of plotting with Vale? That’s high treason. Or did Miss Hampshire report what she saw at the bottom of the tower? That’s disloyalty. I don’t know which one it is. Between the two, I’d rather defend myself for the latter.
“It…it wasn’t like that,” I stammer, my heart hammering against my ribs. I have to fix this. I have to talk him down, or this will end badly. “Kael, please, listen to me. I went to him, yes, but—”
“So you admit it?” He looks at me with wide, horrified eyes, as if I just confessed to murder. “You admit you let that bastard…corrupt you?”
“I didn’t let him corrupt anything!” I cry out, desperate to calm him. “I went to his tower to ask him about the curse!”
Kael stares at me. He blinks once, twice, the information processing slowly through the haze of alcohol. “Tower?”
“Y-yes,” I stammer. “He…he kissed me, but I pulled away! Kael, I swear to you, nothing else happened.”
His expression twists. The horror deepens, liquefying into a nausea so profound he looks ready to retch. “Repeat that.”
“Nothing else happened! I swear—”
“Not that!” he roars, his voice trembling. “He kissed you!?”
“Just once!” I plead, the lie spilling out, desperate to save my skin. “I swear, Kael, nothing more happened! I wouldn’t betray you like that. I pushed him away immediately!”
Silence stretches thin and taut.
Then he starts to laugh.
It starts low in his chest, a rumble of disbelief, before erupting into a full-blown, hysterical cackle. He throws his head back, laughing at the dark sky, at the glass, at me.
It’s a chilling, broken sound.
Loud. Unhinged.
The fine hairs on my arms stand up. “I swear, I rejected him immediately.”
He laughs even harder. His head tips back again, throat exposed, crown glinting cruelly in the moonlight. Then he drops his chin and looks at me again, and whatever is in his eyes makes my blood freeze over.
“You…told…him.” His face contorts, rage snapping his features tight. “You told him about the letter!”
“I didn’t!” The denial flies out before I can think.
“Liar!”
He lunges. This time, there’s no clumsy stumble. He slams me back against the greenhouse glass with a force that squeezes my lungs, one pane cracking. His hands clamp onto my shoulders, fingers digging past the cotton, bruising the muscle.
“Where is she?” he bellows, his face twisting into jagged lines of pure aggression. He shoves me again, my head thudding painfully against the metal frame. “Where did he take her, huh? Tell me!”
“Take who?” I’m sobbing now, terror replacing confusion. “I don’t know who you’re talking about!”
“Don’t play the fool!” He releases one shoulder, only to grab my jaw, forcing my head up, his thumb digging into my cheekbone hard enough to bring tears to my eyes. “Did he hurt her?” His voice cracks, fracturing on nothing short of panic. “Answer me! Is she dead?”
“I don’t even know who she is!” I shriek, my hands flailing uselessly against his madness. “Kael, stop! You’re hurting me!”
He draws back his other hand, looking like he might strike me, but instead he slams his fist into the glass beside my ear. Crash! Shards rain down on us, glittering and sharp as he screams, “Where is she?!”
I scream, cowering away, covering my head. “I don’t know. Your brother never said!”
Kael freezes. “My what?”
“He told me everything,” I whimper, the words tumbling out of me as my mind claws for the nearest rope.
“That Maeryn was his mother. How you stole his crown—and I don’t blame you!
I don’t!” My voice cracks, a sob threatening to spill, and I seize it, turn it into something sharper.
“That’s how he got to me, alright? He made me pity him, but I swear, the kiss meant nothing! ”
Kael just stares. His mouth hangs open slightly, releasing a single scoff before he gives a slow shake of his head. “The audacity of that bastard.”
Then he starts laughing again. But this isn’t the hysterical laughter of before; this is darker, sharper. It sounds like bones snapping.
“He stole my misery!” Kael spits, voice shaking with rage. “He took my mother’s blood, my childhood, my nightmares—just so you’d open your goddamn mouth for him!”
His last shout has me jump all over again. “What?”
“I have no brother!” Kael steps closer, eyes blazing, blue turned almost black in torchlight. “My father had one son. Me!”
“But…Maeryn…” No. None of this makes any sense. “He told me that the curse went to the wrong person, that the bloodline was no longer intact. He told me that Maeryn was his mother.”
“Maeryn was my mother!” Kael strikes his chest, the sound hollow and hard. “She never held me, never kissed me. Never even fucking looked at me, but yes, that bitch birthed me.”
My breath hitches. “No…that’s—”
“I watched her die!” His voice shatters on the last word, then hardens again. “I watched as my father cut her throat in the royal chamber. Ran to her. Tried to make her look at me. And then…” He shakes his head, laugh turning ragged. “Then my true mother came to the palace.”
My veins freeze over. Not the one who birthed him—the one who finally showed him love.
“Ophelia,” I whisper, voice snagging on that name like cloth on a nail.
“They brought me to the painter’s chamber.
” His voice is soft, nothing but a whisper.
“Told me to sit still. Told me to smile. Told me to take her hand so we’d look…
like a family.” He drags the back of his hand across his mouth like he can wipe the memory off.
He can’t. “I wouldn’t. I didn’t know her.
I didn’t want her touching me. I thought—” Kael’s gaze goes unfocused, like he’s seeing that sunlit room again: dust in the air, paint on cloth, the smell of oils and old wood.
“She reached into her sleeve,” he says, and his mouth trembles.
“And she pulled out a stupid little toy—boxwood, carved into a horse. Blue thread at its mane.” His breath breaks on a sound that might have been a laugh in another life.
“A ridiculous thing. A child’s thing. She held it out like it was treasure. ”
The memory of that diary entry slams into my chest, heart cracking clean down the middle. “Kael…”